Awards-Season Power Couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander Are Gonna Make You Cry

Though they‘re the chicest and most mysterious couple of awards season, keeping their romance simmering away from the public eye and not even attending awards shows together, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander have an origin story that we all get to witness. That’s right, they met on a movie set, and this first trailer for The Light Between Oceans is by far the most we’ve ever seen the two share a frame. You can examine it with Zapruder-like intensity to figure out what they’re really like together, but by then you might be crying too hard.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, the film finds Fassbender and Vikander as a lonely couple living on a windswept island whose lives are blessed with the arrival of a baby—a literal arrival, on a boat like Moses in the reeds. They raise the girl as their own and everything is peachy (have you ever wanted to move to remote island more in your life?) until they meet a woman (Rachel Weisz) whose claim to the baby might be a bit stronger than theirs. Heightened emotions, and running down the beach away from your problems, ensues.

There’s a melodramatic strain through the trailer that might incline skeptics to write this off, but Light Between Oceans comes from director Derek Cianfrance, who brought pitch-perfect melodramatic strains to his films Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. So if anyone’s going to make you cry, it’s going to be this guy. And maybe the realization that you’ll never be as chic as Michael and Alicia, but we can’t help you with that one.